As with many of you, I have been in the marketing technology space for a little while. During that time, I have heard (and certainly spoken) my share of buzzwords. In fact, I could probably throw together 500 words on email marketing buzzwords — stay tuned for that blog post in the coming weeks! Anyway, two words I do not hear often enough in relation to email are “anticipated” and “appreciated.” There are two interesting trends occurring in the email marketing space that make these particularly relevant: the flash sale and localized marketing.

The flash sale. Online shopping sites like Hautelook, Gilt Group, Rue La La, LivingSocial and others have created hugely loyal followings based on incredible offers that are exclusive to the members of their communities. Email is a critical component of their business, essentially allowing flash sale vendors to deliver large volumes of email simultaneously to an opt-in subscription list and have their customers race to the shopping cart and check out with their items before the “deal” disappears.

Why are these programs so successful? The complete transparency between the brand and the subscriber coupled with constancy in messaging results in a base of subscribers who anticipate the marketing offer. These opt-in programs are not interruption marketing tactics; rather, they represent the ability of an email marketer to create a program that is so valuable, consumers actually anticipate its arrival.

Unfortunately, email marketers have become complacent due to their own success. Email is a highly profitable channel, yet only a fraction of recipients actually engage with daily promotional messages from brands. Marketers must take a very close look at their programs and ask themselves, “Is my subscriber anticipating today’s email communication — or is he/she simply going to ignore the message, along with so many others?”

Here are some strategies to improve the anticipation factor of your email marketing communications:

Continue reading the full post on Email Insider.

So far twitter has avoided the advertising route, but why not do something like the below? At the bare minimum we’d like them to brand their emails and provide some thing more than just an alert. In this example we’ve included some links to other people my new follower follows.

Twitter follow example email

@twitter  We’d love to help send your email! Call us.

You don’t get a second chance to make a first impression.

So why send a poorly formatted welcome email. If you don’t engage the user now at this touchpoint where they are expecting your email, how do you expect to engage them when you send your marketing message.

The two biggest problems with welcome emails:

1. Not engaging
2. Doesn’t make it to the inbox

Both result with your new signup not coming back!

Imagine the following scenario, Joe Bloggs signs up at your website, he lands on the page after sign up and gets a call from his boss, he picks up the phone and starts talking, after he’s done he goes back to the site and realizes he has no time to look at it but takes another peek. Fast forward 4 hours to the end of the day…

Joe Bloggs looks at his email and he sees the welcome email from yoursite.com, he opens it and it’s a simple blah blah non branded email – he deletes it and goes home. If we take this further, next week he gets a marketing message from you that is all nice and pretty, but he’s already thinking not sure why I bothered so ignores it.

What if the welcome email had grabbed his attention again, got him back to the site at the end of the day? Or just given him some branding so that when he next got a marketing email he’d recognize your brand and actually give it a read?

Finally, consider ecommerce, your welcome to checkout conversion rate can be increased dramatically with great welcome emails. If you are still reading this – STOP – and go edit your welcome emails!

Since CAN-SPAM essentially says peer initiated are OK (albeit this was before web mail address books were being scraped as a daily basis), we’ve asked our clients to follow our best practices and we ask that if you are doing them yourselves that you do as well. It will improve your chances of delivery into the inbox, and you won’t be alienating people and degrading your domain!

Peer initiated emails should adhere to the following requirements:

1. Emails must clearly declare in the pre-header and footer that they are a peer initiated and show the address they were initiated by along with easy access to the global unsubscribe link
2. Subject lines must be clear about the purpose of the email
3. Emails should contain mailing address, and links to the privacy policy and terms of use
4. The privacy policy must clearly state that you will not use email addresses from your user’s address book other to send the requested peer initiated email
5. Within the site UI where the user provides details to log into their web addressbook, their must be a notice that you will not be storing usernames, passwords or email addresses other than for the imminent use along with a link to the pricacy policy
6. The From address must be that of the customer service address for the website (the reply-to can be that of the requester)
7. The interaction with the user on the site must clearly indicate that emails are being sent on their behalf.
8. Sensible limits should be imposed so that people are not sending to their entire gmail address book which could be 2000+

We provide GetConnect as a service to grow communities and websites, but we are very strict at maintaining good standards.

Do you send an authentication email AND a welcome email or are they one and the same?

Do you send an email to a new user that hasn’t signed in again for a month?

Does your reset password email just contain a single link? Your touchpoints with your users are the best chance to tell them about your twitter account, or a new promotion. Just because it’s a reset password email doesn’t mean it can’t have extra information. Just make sure the purpose of the email is the main call to action. (And I hope you have a reset password email, not a “here’s your password” email – ALL passwords should be encrypted on ALL sites – lots of people still use the same passwords for all accounts and if you are not encrypting then you are a security flaw for the unfortunate).

I suggest you do a periodic review of your emails, make sure they contain good content, timely content, are easy to read, and engage your users. Think about it from your users point of view, would you like to receive these emails? Finally look at your bounce rates from your emails, you want to aim to keep your bounce rate as low as possible, a high bounce rate from traffic generated by email means something is not right.

In the mean time we will keep trying to make the email business a better place so that spammers and phishers can do no harm!

Well, it’s actually the fact that GMail has a big edge, a huge edge even. Up until very recently GMail was used primarily by techies, techies that unsubscribe from email they subscribed to and flag real SPAM as SPAM. See the subtle difference?

A non techie will tend to flag anything as SPAM they no longer want to receive. So why is GMail’s SPAM filter starting to get a little sloppy? Because more users are flagging things incorrectly.

One thing I absolutely suggest that you always put within your emails the date your users signed up. The secret is to encourage users to behave correctly as society should! Flag only SPAM as SPAM and we won’t get any (or much).

I’m still hoping we will come up with a solution that will kick those spammers into the stratosphere, although a recent legal ruling might help some what – $873 million fine.

Seriously, come on people!

How many of you spend more than two hours writing and designing your monthly newsletter? A newsletter that will get an open rate of under 20%.

Now how long did you spend writing and designing your reset password email? You know the email, the one people get when they have forgotten their password and haven’t been to your site in a while. The one that gets an open rate close to 100%.

You might want to tell them something about your site, a new feature perhaps or a discount?

I ask you to think differently about your email in future. Spend time where it should be spent, on transactional email then your marketing emails.

Please use the comments below to tell me your most valued transactional email and what you’ve done to make it more powerful to your business.

Let’s say you send out an email to your friends about your new blog, if you send them to your site with a link that has the above paremeters you can easily look up what effect your email had!

It’s as simple as www.example.com/?utm_source=neil&utm_medium=email and then you can see all the traffic you sent under the traffic sources report.

If you are not doing it, then start NOW. Use the Google url builder.

It’s vitally important to realize that if you are just sending email from your server and expecting that it goes in the inbox you are wrong.

Make sure you have an SPF record at the bare minimum, also that you are allowing people easy access to unsubscribe. Also test out your emails, and make sure that you aren’t going in the spam box in the major webmail providers.

Once you have got in the inbox, make sure you are engaging the user. If you are just sending a simple email why should your brand new, eager user authenticate? Are you tracking the click through to your website? How many people signed up and didn’t authenticate?